Subject: Re: [GSoC update] git-remote-svn: The final one

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 22:11:27 +0530

Hi Stephen,

Stephen Bash writes:
> > > So being selfish, what I care about is an improved method for
> > > converting SVN repos to git repos once and never going back. It
> > > sounds to me like the major hurdles remaining there are getting
> > > svn-fe to handle dumpfile v3 and handling branches/tags. Is that
> > > correct?
> > 
> > We're doing better than that- when the whole thing is complete, we
> > should have perfectly seamless two-way compatibility.
> 
> That makes complete sense.  It just happens I'm interested in a subset of the problem (the order has come down from on high that we will be using git for future development), so I'm curious if/how a one-time conversion simplifies things.

Thanks for bringing this up- it's quite interesting :)

A one-time conversion thing would have changed our priorities. Mainly,
I wouldn't have been able to justify the time I invested in building
svnrdump. I'd have probably settled for complete mirror + dump using a
combination of existing tools. The second difference:
svn-dump-fast-export is quite complex; although it was probably an
unconcious decision on David's part, it makes a really good generic
parser, and I suspect that it'll help us generate the dumpfile we need
for loading revision history data back into Subversion. Third, it
simplifies the branch/ tag mapper greatly- we'd only need to achieve a
perfect one-way mapping. A symmetric mapping is harder for several
reasons- consider preserving props for instance.

-- Ram